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In the spring of 2003, the Bay Area psychoanalytic community had the great fortune to have as a guest visitor Italian psychoanalyst Antonino Ferro. Before the clinical seminars began, local psychoanalyst Luca Di Donna spoke with Ferro many times over the phone to talk about his thinking on transformative interpretation, the function of the field, and his use of the dream, among other things.
LD Nino, out of the many interviews that you have given about your work, the one I liked best was with Alberto Lampignano.i So, I will use some of his questions and also expand on other topics. To start, I would like to know something about your background. Where did you start your career?
AF I was born and raised in Palermo, Sicily, studied medicine there, and then studied psychiatry and psychoanalysis in Milan.
LD I understand that you had a rich training in psychiatry with De Martis and Petrella based on psychoanalytic ideas and phenomenology, which has influenced your work as well as your psychoanalytic training. This was at a time when many changes were taking place in Italian psychoanalysis.
AF I was very fortunate to have had great teachers in psychiatry, and I had the opportunity to study with and be supervised by leading Italian analysts, such as Nissim Momigliano and Eugenio Gaburri. I was also supervised by analysts from England and France from different theoretical positions and learned their way of working both theoretically and clinically.
LD My impression in reading your work, especially some of the clinical cases that you supervised in Sao Paolo, Brazil, is that you are very attentive to how you interpret the material.
AF After many years of clinical work with disturbed patients, I realized that complete interpretations or saturated interpretations are not useful to patients. My work especially was shaped by working with psychotic and borderline states. I found that interpretations that are direct or frontal are not effective. I think that the patient is more recepti